Building Business Continuity Through Unified Communications

All businesses have the potential to experience disruptive events. As storms like Hurricanes Dorian have shown, these events are occurring with increasing regularity, and they can have dramatic effects on business.

An advanced unified communications (UC) system can protect business continuity by: reducing the impact of a business disruption on business operations, reducing the costs of assuring that facilities are available in the event of a disruption and enabling staff operational efficiencies by process continuity.

Imagine an event that results in four weeks of lost business effort and occurs once every 10 years. The result is a loss of about two days per year of operation. With 220 working days, this translates to a loss of about 1 percent of overall business effectiveness.

Using advanced UC to help ensure that business can continue leads to a .5 percent increase in business results, eliminating half the loss.

Save on Unneeded Space

Often, businesses expand their facilities to ensure that staff members have space to continue operations in the case of an outage. By using UC to enable workers to work from anywhere, even if their physical workplace is disrupted, companies can reduce the need for extra or expanded facilities. With an average cost of about $10,000 for facilities per employee, a reduction of 10 percent results in a savings of $1,000 each year per employee.

Rethink On-Site Staffing

Using UC to enable “on‐call” response rather than requiring staff to be in the office for occasional calls can dramatically reduce costs. For example, a senior repair technician previously restricted to the office to ensure availability can now work anywhere.